Sunday, October 14, 2007

The eloquent and provocative Hugh Fitzgerald over at Jihad Watch has a message for Turkey, a supposed 'ally' of the US. Turkey, in case you haven't heard, is throwing a hissy fit over a non-binding resolution recently passed by a US Congressional Committee that voted to call the WW1 Ottoman mass murders of Armenian Christians officially a 'genocide'.

Note to the Turkish government:

1) The Cold War, or at least the First Cold War, is over. It is no longer 1950, or 1960. There is no longer a need for Turkey's help in confronting Russia, which, while it has reverted to unpleasantness and despotism, is not the menace it once was. And Turkey is not quite so important a place for listening-posts and other bases.

2) Turkey was seen, not quite correctly, as a staunch ally against Communism, because, you see, "Islam is a bulwark against Communism." American policymakers liked the Turkish generals, with their stolid soldiers (who fought in Korea). But they failed to realize that they got along so swimmingly with those Turkish generals not because they were such good Muslims (and therefore positively bulwarkish against Communists), but because they were not -- because they were in fact "modern Turks," bearers and preservers and protectors of the Kemalist legacy.

3) Those Turkish generals, and the secular class of Turks whose development had occurred because of the constraints Ataturk placed on the political and social power of Islam, did not do what they should have before the Return of Islam under Erbakan, and such shadowy backers as Fethuleh, and Erdogan, and now Gul. That is, they did not continue to pursue, to push still further, the Kemalist program. They were satisfied with what had been achieved. Like the leftists in Iran who made common cause with Khomeini, they could not quite believe that the lowly Muslims -- that is, the real Believers -- would ever return to power. But they have, and they are also, cunningly and methodically, chipping away at the whole Kemalist enterprise.

4) Turkey has not fulfilled, as it seems to think, its duties to its American "ally." It did not permit the use of Incirlik airbase. Three rather than four divisions, therefore, had to take over Iraq. There was no invasion force from the north that might have made a difference in Anbar.

5) The Turkish population has, in the last few years, made a viciously anti-American movie -- one depicting American soldiers in Iraq as veritable Nazis, and a Jewish doctor as a Mengele-like figure, harvesting the organs of dead Iraqis to be sent to such places as "Los Angeles and Tel Aviv" -- into the biggest Turkish box-office smash of all time. And at the top of the book bestseller list was a Turkish edition of Mein Kampf. And high Turkish officials described the American effort in Iraq as one of rapacious murderers. No one in Turkey seemed to think they were duty-bound to protest. No one seemed to realize that there was anything that needed protesting.

6) Turkey is a member of NATO. The Turks apparently think they will remain in NATO no matter how outrageously they behave. But why should NATO continue to tolerate an Islamic country? What conceivable good can come of having privy to NATO circles a government like that now in power in Istanbul, given that the great threat to the other countries of NATO, and to the Western alliance, comes now from the forces of Jihad? That is, Jihad through terrorism, Jihad through qitaal or conventional warfare, Jihad through the Money Weapon, Jihad through campaigns of Da'wa, Jihad through demographic conquest, Jihad through the constant pressure and battering of the legal and political institutions of every Infidel nation-state in which Muslims now feel themselves to be sufficiently numerous and powerful to act in such a manner. They are sure that there will be no consequences no matter what changes in those institutions or special treatment that they continue to demand. They are sure there will be no consequences despite the extraordinary prickliness and quickness to anger, and the campaigns of apologetics intended to sow deliberate confusion among the Infidels, and the refusal to collaborate, as one would think all Muslims would be eager to, falling all over themselves to, with security forces in ferreting out all those -- those "few" -- who have "hijacked a great religion" and so need to be watched, reported on, taken into custody, expelled or imprisoned.

The Turkish government may find that its threats will win it a temporary reprieve in Washington. It may be that the Bush Administration will be able to stop this resolution from being passed. It may be that Bush thinks that the large-scale murders of Christian Armenians by Muslim Turks began in 1915, when it began twenty years before, with no "wartime conditions" to blame, with the first great modern massacre of those Christian Armenians (in which both Muslim Turks and Muslim Kurds participated): the massacres of 1894-96.

But it won't be able to do that forever. It is up to the secular Turks -- Orhan Pamuk has been among the first -- to start discussing the mass murder, or genocide, of the Armenians. They can't hope to prevent the discussion. The more they try to stop it, the more intense that discussion will become. Vahakn Dadrian's book will go into another edition, and another, and another. And Spyros Vryonis's work on the massacres of the Greeks, and the 1955 attacks -- The Mechanism of Catastrophe -- will start being read more avidly. The more they deny, the more it will come out.

And they will see. They can already see that the E.U. does not need Turkey, does not want Turkey. And they will see that NATO, and the Americans, do not need Turkey, a recalcitrant Turkey, a difficult Turkey, a Turkey that makes demands for the rewriting or the ignoring of history. This is not a Turkey that the American government needs quite so much. After all, if the Turkish army will not be ordered to collaborate with Infidels against other Muslims -- and it will not be, not by the current government -- then what good is Turkey to NATO? Who will it fight, or help to fight?

The Americans should have learned, must have learned, that they never again should invade and remain in a Muslim country. By all means, when necessary, bomb from on high; that's what missiles and planes in the Air Force are for. But not land troops, not remaining in place among a permanently hostile population -- hostile not because we do this or fail to do that, and not as Bush likes to say "because of who we are" (meaning, as he does, people who "love freedom" blah blah blah), but "because of who we are" in another, more primitive and obvious sense: we are not Muslims, we are instead Infidels. That's enough. That's more than enough.

This Tarbaby in Iraq apparently now is forcing the Administration to placate Turkey. That is one more reason, if one more were needed, to exit Iraq as soon as an administration comes to power that is capable of coming to its geopolitical senses.

The brouhaha may, not right away, but soon, lead to Turkey threatening to leave NATO. No doubt the Turkish government fully expects the Americans to rush to them, to offer them this and offer them that in an attempt to get them to stay. They may find that no one tries to stop them, that every country in NATO is secretly pleased that the one Muslim state has removed itself, voluntarily, and thus relieved NATO members of the difficult and embarrassing undertaking of forcing Turkey out.